Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture by Catherine Gunther Kodat (review)

Questions about the politics of Cold War concert dance have produced a growing body of literature in dance studies over the past ten years.¹ Catherine Gunther Kodat’s book Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture, which probes the politics of select examples of modernist concert dance during the period, participates in this ongoing discussion. Examining dance through the disciplinary lenses of American and literary studies, fields in which she has impressive records of publication, Kodat also writes the book as a defense against scholarly assumptions outside of dance studies that concert dance is irrelevant to the study of cultural politics.

The Preface begins with an informative anecdote. Kodat recalls a scene at the Toledo airport in 1996, when she ran into a “well-known Marxist scholar” who was returning home from the same conference she was, intended for historians and literary scholars studying Cold War U.S. politics and culture. Referring to a paper Kodat had presented on The Nutcracker, the scholar questioned the seriousness of ballet as a research interest because, as he put it, ballet was “fake” and “elitist” (x). Interpreting his comments as measure of both his leftist convictions and of his homophobia, Kodat contemplated the implications of his judgment thus:

What he did say seemed plain enough: as a “fake” and “elitist” cultural discourse, ballet could hardly be said to have an aesthetics, let alone a politics, worthy of intellectual engagement. … The implication was clear: why was I bothering with something so frivolous and inconsequential—with a cultural practice whose politics, assuming it even had a politics, could only be retrograde? Shouldn’t I be studying something important?

(x–xi)

Taking these comments as an intellectual call to arms, Kodat redoubled her efforts to prove ballet’s scholarly and political relevance within a Marxist schema, and especially with respect to issues of artistic and aesthetic autonomy from capital and dominant cultural production. Asserting that dance often does not receive its due in considerations of the politics of the period, Kodat’s book makes a worthy case that the study of select modernist choreographic practices, and their production and reception at home and abroad, will yield original and valuable information about U.S. cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Putting into play Jacques Rancière’s concept of metapolitics, a theory that illuminates the politics of artistic strategies of distancing, Kodat endeavors to limn the significance of an eclectic mix of cultural samples, including concert dance.

While her enthusiasm for taking up this cause is commendable, Kodat places herself in a precarious position by taking on a research project anchored in an unfamiliar scholarly field. With noticeably limited knowledge of past and current research on dance and politics, and of the historiography of twentieth-century ballet and modern dance, Kodat devotes considerable verbiage to arguing the question of whether or not concert dance has a politics at all (a question long settled in the affirmative among dance scholars) and, if so, determining the relevance this politics has to an understanding of the cultural Cold War.

Chapter 1, entitled “Combat Cultural” (after a poem published by Marianne Moore in 1959), situates Kodat’s research within Cold War cultural and diplomatic studies and as an intervention within Marxist and post-Marxist debates over autonomy. Here Kodat presents an array of precedent views explaining the artist’s relationship to dominant ideology, dividing scholars into four camps: (1) “triumphalists,” whose treatment of domestic and international artistic production serves an agenda of rationalizing the U.S. Cold War victory as a foregone conclusion—to cite the examples Kodat provides, “the defection of Soviet ballet dancers” to America or “the jamming of Voice of America transmissions of jazz music” (p. 11); (2) those who see the relationship in terms of “complicity,” who believe...